Jinsei
by kaliawai512
Summary: Orihime dreamed of five lifetimes, but there were far more than that, and one white hand that reached through them all to grasp for someone he could not seem to touch. Alternate universes, following one girl and the one who follows her.


**Rating: K+ for violence and rather dark themes  
**

**Pairing: interpretable Ulquihime (if you want to see it, it's there, and if you don't, it's not - and if it's there, sometimes it's romantic and sometimes it's definitely not), with mentions of other possible pairings in various parallel universes**

**The plays on the idea of "not-necessarily-romantic soulmates," as it were: that two people are meaningful to each other in some sense throughout various lives—or, in this case, parallel universes. It also plays on my head canon that Orihime would have several "soul mates" (her nakama, for instance) including Ulquiorra, but Ulquiorra would only have one. Oh, and as I said, Ulquihime is interpretable, but not always romantic—there are cases presented in this story where romance would be… sick. You'll see. But in the not-sick cases, romantic or not is your choice. Spoilers for the Arrancar Arc and the bonus chapter in UNMASKED.**

**Beware the angst. And the fluff. And the angsty fluff, and fluffy angst. For those of you who read my last story, "Kono Tenohira"… this isn't so happy. Really. Fair warning (though there are happy moments). I hope you enjoy it anyway.  
**

**Also, if you leave a review (thank you!), I may take a bit to reply to you: I'm literally about to leave for wisdom tooth surgery, but wanted to post this beforehand, since it's already edited and all. Thank you **_**so much **_**for those of you who read "Kono Tenohira" and left such kind words. It's really inspired me to start writing more (and, well, happier stuff than this XD - I actually started writing this before Kono Tenohira, and am only now trying to write less angsty work).**

**Oh, and the site really needs to upset its dictionary for spellcheck. I always double-check my work after I've uploaded it to the Doc Manager, and it apparently doesn't know "dessert" is a word, among many others.**

_**Jinsei**_

Orihime dreamed of five lifetimes. Only five. She dreamed of her careers, and the food she would eat, and the places she would live, and the one person she would fall in love with. To her, five lifetimes was an eternity, a gift wrapped up in pretty paper to be treasured and explored.

But far more than five lifetimes had been pressed together, parallel, untouchable, with different versions of herself wandering around in infinite different worlds. In which she had far more than five jobs, far more than five hometowns, and far more than five paths her life could have taken if the slightest step had been changed. Orihime had always been known for her imagination, but she only thought of the trivial. She thought of jobs and food and love. She did not think of wars and death and sacrifice. She did not think of everything that might have gone wrong.

In some worlds, the changes were slight. She wore her hair parted differently. She lived in apartment 406 instead of 407.

In others, the changes tore like a blade slicing across flesh.

* * *

All it took was a second.

* * *

In one lifetime, Kurosaki-kun left the training ground in Soul Society moments later than expected.

The Soukyoku hit its target, and Kuchiki-san was dead in an instant.

Kurosaki-kun was just close enough to see.

He rampaged through Soukyoku Hill, slicing down anyone who proclaimed to have anything to do with Kuchiki-san's death. Byakuya-san was killed when his Hollow emerged, and every vice captain, every officer who stood in his way, dead in instants. Then Kyouraku-san stepped in and finished off the merciless avenger before any other innocents could be harmed. Kurosaki-kun, even with his Hollow in control, did not see the attack coming, and his death was messy, as no clean strikes could take down the mindless beast. His corpse had been too mangled for Orihime to even think of healing him through the tears that streamed down her cheeks.

At some point in the battle, Renji-kun had joined, close enough to help, and Sado-kun had run ahead before Orihime and Ishida-kun could catch up. Against all the captains of Soul Society, they didn't stand a chance. And they knew it. With Sado-kun's energy still depleted and Renji-kun's prior injuries only partially healed, they lasted just seconds.

Sado-kun was killed by Ise Nanao. Renji-kun was brought to the infirmary, but even after Orihime spent all night with Souten Kisshun, she doubted he would survive. He died the next morning.

Her powers had not had time nor occasion to mature. If it had been mere months later, she might have saved them all.

Aizen betrayed Soul Society with the freed Hogyouku, just as he had planned, and he and Ichimaru and Tousen left through the Negacion as the rest of the Shinigami watched in disbelief from the aftermath of the massacre.

Only after the news about the truth of Central 46 spread did all of Soul Society realize the mistake that had been made, the lives that had been lost without reason. Ishida-kun and Orihime were brought before the remaining captains and given the closest to a formal apology the captain-commander was willing to give. Several of the captains present promised them safe passage home and any later favors they cared to ask.

But none of that mattered.

For the few days they stayed, Orihime cried into Ishida-kun's shoulder, and Ishida-kun sat stiff and silent and held her, unable to bring himself to speak.

Then they went home to bury Sado-kun's body, and to think of a way to tell Kurosaki-kun's family what had happened while Kon-san remained in his place. They never managed to find one.

Several months later, the souls of everyone in Karakura Town were made into the Ouken, and it no longer made a difference.

* * *

Some lifetimes were nightmares, and some were dreams.

At least Orihime would have wanted to call them that. The lifetimes themselves had no knowledge of what wishes they granted and denied.

But she would have been glad to know there was a lifetime where Kurosaki-kun fell in love with her before Kuchiki-san even arrived, and they had been a couple, holding hands on the way home from school, sitting on seesaws in the park, and drinking strawberry-and-wasabi milkshakes by the river.

Kuchiki-san still came and gave Kurosaki-kun her powers. She was still arrested and taken to her execution, and Kurosaki-kun still went after her, followed by Ishida-kun and Sado-kun and Orihime. But when they went back home and the Arrancars threatened, Orihime didn't leave for Soul Society to train with Kuchiki-san, and stayed with Kurosaki-kun and the Visoreds instead, to train with Hacchi-san at Kurosaki-kun's insistence. She was useful. She could help. And when Kurosaki-kun looked at her, he saw not just someone to protect, but someone who could fight at his side.

She got the wish she had been denied time and time again.

And after they married years down the road, she became the first shop owner to bake cakes for astronauts in a space station—and, without her knowledge, to give them all food poisoning.

Two unlikely wishes in one lifetime wasn't bad at all.

* * *

Nightmares were easier to build than dreams, it seemed.

In one life, her friends all died invading Las Noches. Kuchiki-san and Aaroniero killed each other. Nnoitra struck down Sado-kun with a single blow. Szayelaporro spent no time toying with Renji-kun and Ishida-kun and killed them both with little effort, before they even had time to think of a plan. And Grimmjow never took her to heal Kurosaki-kun, and he was left with a hole in his chest, eyes wide open and Nel-chan sobbing over his corpse.

Aizen created the Ouken and took the throne in the sky, and Orihime remained in Las Noches. He gave Ulquiorra-kun free reign of what to do with her—kill her, let her go—and Ulquiorra-kun chose to keep her in that cell. He brought her meals three times a day, and sometimes she refused, and sometimes he forced the food into her mouth and clamped his hand over her nose and lips until she chewed and swallowed. But Orihime had never been one to dwell on pain for long. She cried for her friends who had tried to rescue her, for the captains who had come to help only to be too late, for all the people of Karakura Town who had been sacrificed for a key, but no longer for the life she might have had. She made each of them a grave marker on her wall with a tiny rock she found in the corner. Then she spent her days sitting on her couch.

She smiled at her jailer when he came in, and she called him "Ulquiorra-kun" even when he protested, and when he occasionally fell asleep while he waited for her to eat, she covered him with her blanket rather than attempting to stab him with the knife from her meal.

She wasn't sure if she did it for her own sake, or to irritate him, or because she could not truly hate him, no matter how she tried.

But nonetheless, she lived, and her dreams of owning a cake shop were replaced with the days Ulquiorra-kun took her outside, and she sat in the sand admiring the moon and smiling a smile that cracked the wall of stone a little more each day.

* * *

There were lifetimes where Onii-chan didn't die.

Sometimes someone called an ambulance, and he got to a hospital in time.

In most of them he had gotten a better job in Tokyo when she was ten, and they moved away from Karakura Town. He never bought her hairpins. The third-years never cut her hair. She never met Tatsuki-chan, or Kurosaki-kun, Ishida-kun, Sado-kun, or Kuchiki-san or Renji-kun. She never knew about Hollows. She and Onii-chan lived long and happy lives far away from pain.

They were out at an amusement park when the news story of the sudden appearance of a giant hole where Karakura Town had once stood, and they didn't find out until the next day.

* * *

In another, she went to find him as soon as she knew he would be off from work. She apologized for yelling at him, and he hugged her, and they held hands to walk to the bakery and order one of everything to try at home.

The car hit them both.

* * *

There were lifetimes—many of them—where Ulquiorra-kun lived.

But the universe was not often kind more than once.

* * *

Loly and Menoly didn't always fail.

In one lifetime, Loly didn't draw out Orihime's torture. She killed her with one Bala to the head and left her bloodied on the floor. Menoly ran, and Kurosaki-kun sliced Loly through the chest.

Ulquiorra-kun stood watching the massacre in silence, his face straight and cold, his arms frozen at his sides as the tip of his sword clinked against the ground. He stared at the red coating the cinnamon and white, soaking it up, drowning it, and the residual wind from Kurosaki-kun's attack blew through the hole in his chest as if to remind him that it was there.

* * *

In another, she threw herself between Kurosaki-kun and Ulquiorra-kun just as the Lanza was crushed.

The residual impact alone almost knocked her unconscious, but she ran toward them nonetheless. Desperate to save both her friends, old and new, lost in a battle of monsters.

And the black Zanpakutou sliced her instead, shoulder to hip.

* * *

She tried to save him in plenty of lifetimes. She searched for bits of ash to put under her shield, vision blurred by tears, her friends calling her name as she scrambled over the roof in panic.

Only in a few did she think of it in time.

And when he asked if she was afraid of him, she reached back and whispered, "Souten Kisshun."

Through her tears, she could barely make out his widened eyes, his parted lips, his chest still rising and falling in exaggerated motions from exhaustion and shock.

Her relief lasted until she felt the tears drip down from her chin, and her eyes cleared enough for her to see the ash that continued to fall, to blow him away bit by bit even as her shield glowed around him.

She sobbed, cried out, screamed for Shun'o and Ayame to reject, but nothing changed. Her shield glowed, and Ulquiorra-kun disintegrated before her eyes, just the same as before.

But even as she pleaded, she saw his wide eyes soften and his brow lift. She saw disbelief and wonder and what might have been gratitude in those eyes even as his head began to turn to ash in the wind. And as the ash reached his face, ate it up, dissolved it, she almost thought the corners of his mouth tilted up just so. She would never know if he might have smiled. The ash took him before she could see, and she was left on her knees, choking on her own tears as she reached out for someone who was no longer there.

It was months later when she visited Hacchi-san and he explained that the foreign reiatsu left over from Kurosaki-kun's Cero had kept her powers from working, but by then, it made no difference, and Orihime left the Visored warehouse with the same tears on her cheeks.

* * *

Orihime had many lifetimes where she never met Ulquiorra Cifer. In those lifetimes, she was still fulfilled. She had friends, and sometimes she married, and sometimes she was kidnapped by someone else entirely and tried and failed to befriend them.

And just the same, Ulquiorra had lifetimes where he never knew Inoue Orihime.

But they were always empty.

* * *

In some, he had simply never been born.

She never knew, and he never had to suffer.

Had she known, she had might have called it mercy.

* * *

He lived in others, never died young from illness or violence or accidents, lived a long life more than a century before she was born. In some he became a skilled warrior, in others a respected intellectual. But he was always alone.

He was born with a hole deep inside him that could not be seen or touched, and he died before the one who could fill it even came into being.

* * *

And sometimes he died, but the Shinigami found him in time—one had been nearby, or hadn't been too distracted lazing around in a tree to notice him. They performed Konso and he passed on without consequence.

The emptiness remained in Rukongai for sixty years until he was reborn.

* * *

In others still, everything had been the same, but Aizen Sousuke had never found him.

He never left the tree in the center of the desert, and he never knew of another kind of happiness outside of his blissful void.

* * *

There were lifetimes where Ulquiorra stayed a lesser Hollow, avoiding the Shinigami, devouring souls on occasion but always more docile than the others. There were lifetimes where he had yet to become a Vasto Lorde when Aizen found him, and as an Arrancar he had been an ordinary Numeros, perhaps a Fraccion, perhaps only a servant.

In those lives he was never intended to meet Inoue Orihime, but he did so anyway.

Sometimes it was on a mission. Sometimes he had just been given enough free rein to come to the Material World at his own will. And sometimes, in the lifetimes where he remained a lesser Hollow, he was there already, and no matter where he had died, he always ended up in Karakura Town. Sometimes it took years. Sometimes he barely made it without being caught by some unusually-alert Shinigami.

But he always ended up there, one way or another, and he always found her. Arrancar or Hollow, he would see her wandering around town, sitting the park, walking to school, through the window of the bakery with her pink uniform. It was brief, most of the time, and occasionally he followed her as long as he could without her noticing, cloaking his reiatsu with the same skill that had allowed him to survive this long. He never knew why she struck his interest, and usually, he never saw her again. Sometimes she was a child with strange cinnamon hair walking hand in hand with a young man beside her. Sometimes she was a high school student, eating lunch on the roof with her friends. Sometimes she was at her part-time job, sometimes in her apartment, sometimes she was married with children playing in the park, and sometimes she was an old woman humming to herself as she strolled to do her shopping.

He never changed a thing for her. Almost always, she never knew he existed.

It didn't matter, though. One glimpse was enough to know she mattered, even if he never understood why.

* * *

It was rare that two people born more than a century apart would meet. Even in infinite universes, infinite possibilities, the perfect combinations of DNA occurring in two separate people normally so far apart was a rare phenomenon.

But in infinite universes, there were always a few.

She stayed in her time, but he shifted forward. As if he was chasing her through the years, reaching a hand across decades, grasping for something just out of his reach.

In most of those, his fingers grasped the air around her, but did not touch. Only sometimes did his fingertips managed to brush the glow of her own, if only for an instant. But an instant was enough.

* * *

By the time she had her sixth birthday, he had had his eightieth, and spent his days in a nursing home, unmarried, childless, and with no living relatives or friends to pay him visit. Illness had taken his hearing at sixty, his motor skills at seventy, and his ability to form coherent words several years after, until all that was left were his eyes, and all he could do was sit in a chair in the corner of the main room every day and watch. One afternoon in the middle of summer, he watched a little girl walk in with a young man, perhaps in his twenties. He had dark hair above his shoulders, ordinary, just like all the other visitors. But she had cinnamon, bright and thick to her mid-back, her round cheeks glowing with her smile, a pink summer dress to match the flowers—bleeding hearts—clutched between small peachy hands.

She gave a flower to the residents as she passed them, one by one. She held each heart out and waited for them to take it, and most of them would, even if it meant exhausting all their energy to lift a hand and smile and thank her. The young man followed, smiling down at her, but his smile looked like the moon which only glowed with the reflection of the sun.

He was her last stop, resting in a pale green armchair away from all the others. She smiled that same smile. Her big brown eyes gleamed like two miniature suns, her face alight, the young man's hand on the back of her head as if in a constant, silent gesture of affection. She held out her last bleeding heart with both hands and smiled until her eyes squeezed shut.

Ulquiorra blinked and tried, for a feeble, vain moment to make his hand move. But he was a rational man. He knew after ten years, one little girl with flowers would not change a thing.

She held out the flower in patient silence until at last her smile faded, and she opened her eyes again. She motioned to the flower, and when he did not respond, she looked up at the young man. The young man opened his mouth, looked to Ulquiorra, and closed it. He turned to the girl and shook his head. The little girl looked to Ulquiorra, and Ulquiorra stared back, a silent statue.

Then she smiled. Though the vision that remained when all else had abandoned him, he made out tears glistening in the corners of her eyes.

The little girl reached one peachy hand to his pale wrinkled one, pulled apart curled fingers, and slid the bleeding heart inside.

The nerve endings in his hand useless, he could not feel her touch. But he watched each movement as she closed his fingers over the flower's stem, rocked back onto her feet, and smiled up at him, the tears now brimming the edges of those big brown eyes.

She looked up at the young man, and the young man smiled, patted her shoulder, and nodded. And with one more smile and a wave, the little girl walked away until her small form disappeared around the corner to the lobby.

It wasn't until his vision blurred into an ocean of muffled colors and drops of wet warmth burned twin trails into his cheeks that Ulquiorra realized he had cried along with her.

* * *

Sometimes, he reached too far.

From the age of ten, as soon as he was old enough to walk the long distance to school by himself, he visited the cemetery. When he didn't have homework he spent his entire afternoons there, but oftentimes, even if he did, he would bring his tablet with him and finish it while sitting in front of a grave.

_The _grave. There were never any others.

He had searched for the name on the internet a few days after he read it. The name itself was common, and he found plenty of results all across Japan, some of them living, some of them dead. Only when he was thirteen did he finally find a man who had worked there for years, who, when questioned, claimed that he had helped prepare the grave himself thirty-six years before. He spoke of cinnamon hair he had seen in her photos but which had long turned gray, of wrinkled smiles that grew no less bright as the years passed. He spoke of baskets full of baked goods she brought him when she came to visit the graves of her friends, and how, after a single incident he affectionately referred to as "near-food poisoning," he had to find a way to tactfully ask whether or not she had baked them herself before he took a bite. He spoke of kindness, cheerfulness on a face that had seen far more than he could imagine, and even hugs and flowers on the occasion he had a new grave to visit himself.

Ulquiorra had always been well-versed in formalities when it came to adults he knew, but with others his age and even older strangers, he had no qualms going on a given-name basis. Some assumed he was trying to establish familiarity, but they soon realized he just cared little to offer them respect.

With her, though, he could not think of a way to speak her name that did not feel wrong on his tongue.

So he called her "woman."

By age fifteen he brought the woman flowers once a week, as often as his allowance afforded it, even if it meant skipping out on the new headphones he wanted. By seventeen he had become such a frequent visitor that everyone, even those who came only once a year, knew him, and he knew the cemetery just as well, so that whenever a new name popped up, or a grave was left unattended for longer than expected, he noticed. So much that the man who worked there laughed and accused him of trying to steal his job.

The only ones he never allowed to see him were the ones who visited _her._

They came once a year, as many did. They came with flowers and incense, as did most, but unlike most, they also came with food that smelled spicy, sweet and savory, and made him want to gag even from a distance. They came with laughter, even with cakes. And a few that came wore cinnamon hair as the man had described, some with streaks of gray, some so young they still had drool on their chins. Whenever they came, the man talked to them, and they chatted and laughed like old friends over tea rather than cemetery worker and surviving family over a grave.

The man had suggested three times that he say hello, but Ulquiorra never did.

He watched the grave and the name carved into it, and whenever he saw that cinnamon hair on the men and the women and the boys and the girls, his chest clenched and his fingers twitched, and the empty feeling which had plagued him from the day of his birth felt, for a moment, as if it had filled itself in.

* * *

From time to time, their paths met, but no matter how hard he tried, they rarely matched up.

If he had had one version of himself that hovered over them all, he would have decided that even if their paths did not run parallel, but crossed for a split second, that would make him content. Even if they walked along timelines divided by decades, one destined to pass long before the other, any amount of time spent with her was enough to give him a reason to have lived.

* * *

He was taken away from his parents at age three, when they tried to drown him in the bath only months after they moved to Japan, and after four failed attempts at foster homes he ended up in an orphanage. He ran away from the paddlings and the screaming when he was eight, and found the streets only a bit calmer. He got what little money he earned from adults willing to pay for him to rake their leaves, pull weeds from their garden, or sweep their porch. But most of the time he waited by trash cans for people to drop half-eaten sandwiches inside, and snatched them and scurried off into the back of an alleyway to nibble and savor each bite.

It was on the day of the first snowfall that he realized he should have saved more of his money for a coat rather than food. His bones pressed against pale skin as if tissue paper had been stretched around wires, and with each gust of wind the flesh exposed from the holes in his shirt stung. It had been two days since his last meal, but the pains of hunger had faded to the back of his head. Even the cold itself had begun to turn to numbness, so much that the thought of laying down in the snow and going to sleep sounded more and more appealing. He had retreated to his favorite alley nearly an hour ago, slumped against the brick wall. People passed by not four meters away, but none of them looked at him, none of them stopped. He no longer expected anything more.

He stared at the wall in front of him and waited for nothing, silent and alone.

He heard the crunching footsteps long before he saw the form, but even though a part of his mind registered that they approached him, the rest of his mind was too tired and cold to care. When his brain made the connections, he turned his head to find a woman standing not a meter in front of him in the otherwise empty alley, looking down at him with wide eyes and parted lips.

He blinked up at her like he might blink at a bright, blinding light, her color clashed against the white of the snow , so out-of-place that he thought she might have been painted there.

He guessed she was in her late thirties, though the thin lines that wound through her face were different from the ones he saw in others, as if they had been formed through years of smiling too hard. Her cinnamon hair held only a few streaks of gray, her torso wrapped in a thick, long pink coat, and none of the thick makeup around her eyes or lips that he normally saw in women trying to hide the signs of age. She wore her grays and wrinkles proudly, like she might wear a medal dictating a long but pleasant journey.

She put her hands on her knees and bent toward him, her head tilted to the side.

"Hi, there. Are you okay?"

He blinked. Though the cold brick behind him numbed his back, he pressed himself against it. His shoulders tensed. He kept his eyes and mouth neutral, unmoving. But his lack of response did not dissuade her.

"My name's Orihime," she began again seconds later, the smile so constant he wondered if it had been cut into her face. "What's yours?"

He pulled his legs closer to his body and suppressed his shivers. "… you don't need to know."

Her smile remained. She looked him over from his worn shoes to his shirt full of holes, and tilted her head further still.

"Aren't you cold out here? There's snow everywhere! Are your parents close by?"

"No."

He shuddered against his will. Her brow creased, and his lowered. He tightened his arms around his legs, but this time in the hope that it would keep his remaining body heat from escaping. The bottom of his pants had already soaked through from the snow beneath him, and he might have preferred to sit on a block of ice.

Her lips pressed together, her incessant smile now sad and tense. She unbuttoned her thick coat, her movements adept despite her gloves, and tugged it off, leaving her in only a knitted blue sweater. She held it out to him like some rare adults had offered him an onigiri.

"Here. You take this."

He swallowed and lowered his eyebrows more. "You are using it."

She laughed and waved off the comment with a scoff.

"Oh, I'm tough, I can handle a little cold! But you look like you've been out here a while. Go ahead, take it."

She motioned to the coat. He looked up with brow creased, then back to the pink fabric. Then he lifted one thin, pale hand and grasped the thick sleeve, and as soon as he had drawn it close to his chest, she smiled wider—how wide could her smile stretch?—and let it go.

As he covered his arms with the coat like a blanket, the fabric still warm, she nodded toward the street. "My apartment's just a few minutes from here. I've got a space heater, you can come and warm up and I'll make you something to eat."

He gave no response. He stared up at her like he had stared at his foster parents when they put on fake smiles for the social workers checking in. The woman's smile saddened.

"You'll be alright, I promise," she assured him. He almost told her that promises meant nothing, promises were the things grown-ups used when they had no other means to make children trust them.

She was just a woman who had approached him in an alley. She could be a murderer, or a kidnapper, or take him for ransom, though ransom from who he did not know. He had no reason to believe what she said.

But his numb feet moved on their own. They pushed him from the snow with slow, shivering movements, his hand on the ground to support him until he steadied his stance. She smiled down at him, not as tall as he had expected, and he pulled the coat in his arms around his shoulders and held it in place like a blanket.

When she started out of the narrow space, he hesitated, but it took him only a few seconds to follow. His pace remained tired and slow with so little food for fuel, but she adjusted her own steps to match his, so that he almost fooled himself into forgetting how much older she was and how easy it would be for her to walk ahead on a whim and leave him behind. She didn't. She walked into the sun with him at her side while they made their way down the streets.

"So is it okay if I ask your name again?" she broke the silence as soon as the alley had faded in the distance behind him.

He hunched his shoulders and stared at the ground, but glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. His footprints in the snow sounded as loud as bombs.

"… Ulquiorra."

The woman's smile grew so wide that it threatened to break the confines of her cheeks.

"Ulquiorra-kun," she repeated, the name and the honorific sounding both wrong and right on her lips, her voice carrying each syllable like she was icing a cake. "What a nice name. It's good to meet you, Ulquiorra-kun."

He said nothing, and he did not smile in return. But he looked up at her with eyes he could not have read even if he had seen them, and when she took his hand some minutes later to help him up the icy steps to her apartment, he did not pull away.

She made him enough food for three people, and all of it smelled of far too many things at once, but his mouth watered at the sight of something edible, and he picked at it for several minutes before eating in earnest, taking a full-sized portion and leaving the rest on his plate. She sighed, but wrapped the leftovers in plastic and stuck them in the fridge, then turned on her TV to some cartoon Ulquiorra had never seen. She sat next to him and wrapped him with blankets until he was more blanket than boy, and though he soon no longer needed the space heather, she left it on anyway. With a full stomach for the first time in months, the white noise of television chatter, and a smiling face at his side, he nodded off sometime that afternoon with his head against her shoulder.

He woke up the next morning tucked into a futon and covered in every blanket in the house, and only realized around lunchtime that she had taken the day off work to make sure that he was fed and warm and comfortable. He rarely spoke and never thanked her, but her smile remained nonetheless, and he would not tell her it was the best thing he had seen in years.

It was a year later when the official adoption papers went through. He kept his birth name, and he always called her "woman," but she was the closest thing to a parent he had ever known, and he didn't need any official paperwork to tell him that.

He got ten happy years with Inoue Orihime, local schoolteacher and surrogate mother. Then, a week after his eighteenth birthday, she was struck down by a car in the road.

He stood next to one of her friends, Kurosaki Ichigo, at the funeral, and the orange-haired man looked at him, flashed a sad half-smile, and patted his shoulder before Ulquiorra could stop him. Kurosaki Ichigo would have said it was out of sympathy, but Ulquiorra caught him confiding in Sado Yasutora that it had been a foreign, sudden impulse. Neither of them ever understood why.

Ulquiorra walked home alone in the rain and set up a shrine with her photograph in place of the TV.

* * *

In infinite lifetimes, in only one had he reached just far enough.

His parents took him on vacation to Japan—he called it a vacation at school to avoid lengthy explanations and talking to trash he didn't like, but in truth his parents' business had a conference with a Japanese company, and they found it easier to pay for a third plane ticket than to find a babysitter who didn't run for the hills at his deadpan stare. He was fairly certain that families did things together on vacations, rather than left their twelve-year-old son in the hotel room while they went out for the day.

Hotel staff didn't ask questions. The neighbors at home did.

Hundreds of dollars for a plane ticket, for them, was worth upholding a false reputation.

Ulquiorra had always preferred the quiet, and with the books he brought from home, he had no issue staying in the room all day. He could order room service, all the most expensive dishes and every dessert on the menu, and his parents likely wouldn't so much as notice with the already significant hotel bill. But instead he ate a packet of chips and a milk tea from the vending machine down the hall, all the while peering down from the fifth-story window to the town below. His parents would not be home until that evening. His books lay waiting, but for once struck no interest in him. An unexplainable tug ached in the center of his chest, so much that he wondered if it might yank him through the glass to plummet through the air and crash into the concrete underneath.

He never had irrational impulses. Which meant there had to be a logical reason why something he could not see or touch compelled him toward the outside.

Besides, his books would still be there later.

He set his half-finished bag of chips on his bed and did not even turn back when several spilled onto the thick white duvet.

Hotel staff didn't ask questions, so no one gave more than a second glance to the twelve-year-old boy who walked straight through the lobby and out into the streets, with the blinding sun and the bustling people and the noise of chattering and cars enough to make him go deaf.

At first, he understood hardly any of it, just the jumbled blabbering of countless people at once as he melded in with the crowds, surrounded by the faint smell of light perfume, of sweat, of the general stench of _people. _But soon he recalled the Japanese lessons he had worked through over the past weeks when he had nothing to do, and the gibberish became words. The grammar still felt fuzzy, the vocabulary foreign in his ears, but he caught it, and as soon as his brain began to understand, he blocked it out, stuffed his hands in his pockets, ducked his head, and slid through the mess of life.

He didn't know how long he walked or where he was going. He had a small map in his jacket, and he knew enough of the language to ask for directions back to the hotel should he need them. For now he crossed occasional streets, slipped through groups of people, glanced at store signs but otherwise continued without notice. He paused at the edge of yet another street, the gleam of the new, modern cars glowing, the yellow numbers on the small screen on the other side of the road counting down the crossing time. He did not register how long he had left before they reached zero. It hardly mattered to him.

Ulquiorra glanced with little attention right and left, then stepped onto the crosswalk. His feet tapped louder than the chattering and the cars nearby, his footsteps slow, louder than the vaguely screeching wheels that he did not realize had come quite so close.

"Watch out!"

His mind barely had time to translate before he felt two hands on his back, and a shove that sent him flying forward onto the asphalt, just as a car horn blasted in his ear.

The arm he had thrown out in front of him stung through the fabric of his shirt, but the sleeve likely prevented any bloodshed. A weight pressed down on his legs, soft, like someone's stomach, and as soon as his head stopped spinning he looked over his shoulder to see a girl sprawled out over him, both arms stretched out, though neither of them appeared to have hit the ground.

She turned, her short cinnamon hair—didn't all Japanese people have dark hair?—flopping with the movement, and blinked wide eyes before she pushed herself up to sit on the side of the street, just out of the range of the cars. He shook off the sting from his arm and followed her to his knees, the two of them less than half a meter away.

Her sailor-style uniform had a tear on the skirt and dirt on the blouse, but she paid it no mind as she leaned toward him, her lips parted and one hand reached out with hesitant fingers. She still drew in huffs of breath, and he only then realized that he did the same. She bit her bottom lip.

"Are you okay?"

He sucked in another breath through his teeth and tried to ignore the ache in his chest.

"Why did you do that, girl?" he spat, though the panting of his breath and the rushing of his head took some of the bite out of his words.

She blinked twice and glanced back to the road.

"You were … the car was gonna hit you!"

Ulquiorra creased his brow, lips clamped shut even though his lungs still begged for air and his hands shook against his will. He glanced down from her face at a flash of red in the corner of his eye.

"Your knee."

She jerked her head just as he saw the extent of the scrape. All the skin had been torn away by the asphalt, little bits of gray rock stuck in the wound, and he could see a faint bloodstain on the nearby street even as cars passed over it. With her overly dramatic behavior, he was surprised she hadn't started crying yet.

"Huh?" she asked with another blink as she pulled up her knee to examine it. She hummed, then shook her head and smiled, the expression such a contrast from his expectations that it made his brain stutter. She waved her hand and almost laughed. "Oh, that's not that bad. I've had worse!"

Then her attention turned back to him, her eyes big and curious like someone far younger. Her voice changed again, cheerful to worried.

"Why were you just standing in the middle of the street? Did you get hurt?"

He straightened his curved back and evaded her eyes. "I'm fine."

"Are you sure?" she tried again. "One time I tripped and my brother asked if I was okay and I told him I was 'cause I felt just fine, but the next day my ankle hurt really bad so he took me to the doctor and—"

"I told you I'm fine."

He looked up at her in full, his gaze hard and blank, just as he had given everyone in the past, the same stare that had made his foster parents more willing to give him up, the stare that made the other children run from him without an explanation why.

But this girl just poked out her bottom lip and lifted her eyebrows near their center.

"You look sad."

This time, Ulquiorra blinked. "What?"

"Your face," she explained with a slight nod. "It looks like something's wrong."

He hardened his stare, but she did not seem to notice. He glanced away, but her continuous staring drew him back in.

"That's none of your concern, girl."

She scrunched her brow, then lifted it and tilted her head. "But I _am _concerned."

"Why?" he asked, more of an incredulous breath than a word. "I'm a stranger. Not one of your friends."

He intentionally made his Japanese choppier than usual, his decent accent dropped, in a final attempt to make her see reason. But her face did not change, and he wondered if he had spoken so badly that she hadn't understood. A second later, though, her lips stretched into another smile. This one wider, more real, her brown eyes so bright they burned like the sun.

"You could be my friend! I'd like that!"

Ulquiorra lifted his shoulders toward his ears, the skin between his eyebrows creased once more, but his eyes wider than he preferred.

"… we just met," he murmured. His proper accent returned against his will. "You don't know me."

Her smile remained, unwavering and unbroken.

"Yes I do," she insisted with a small, almost sad giggle. "I know you look like you need a friend."

Something in his chest ached, but he stilled the hand that wanted to grasp it.

She put both hands on the asphalt and pushed herself to her feet, and as she stepped onto the sidewalk, Ulquiorra followed, his movements slow and even in contrast to her lively bounce.

When he stood next to her, he found them both about the same height. She was indeed around his age, then. He slipped his hands into his pockets while she clasped hers behind her back and beamed wide and real.

"My name's Orihime!" she started with a small bow, as if their prior conversation had never occurred. "What's yours?"

His lips opened and closed, his eyes wide against his will, his breath caught in his throat before he even tried to answer.

"Orihime, there you are!"

Ulquiorra's shoulders tensed at the faint voice, and the girl jerked her head to her right. Far off on the sidewalk, he could just make out another girl, about the same age, with short, spiked black hair, a sailor uniform to match, and her hand raised high in the air. The cinnamon-haired girl laughed, jumped and waved, her own hand so high that it looked as if her arm might snap off.

"Tatsuki-chan!"

She dropped her arm and turned back toward him, her smile bright despite her skinned knee and the smaller scrapes on her hands he had barely had chance to notice before. His brain skipped again, like a computer that had come across a file it could not read, and did not know how to deal with.

"Wait here a second, okay? That's my best friend Tatsuki-chan, I'll go get her and introduce you!"

He tried to make himself nod, but all he could do was stare, lips parted with the words he could not find. She kept her smile, nonetheless, and started toward the other girl far down the sidewalk.

But as soon as he watched her skip away to find her friend, a crowd of other schoolchildren passed by, and he was forced back into a nearby alley to avoid getting trampled. By the time they passed, the sidewalk had grown thick with people again, and he could not make out her head of short cinnamon hair. He stared and searched, but found no one. It was minutes later that he finally dropped his shoulders, shook his head, and started back toward the hotel. He would never see her mere meters away, pushing her way through the crowd and calling for the boy whose name she had never learned.

He left for home with his parents several days later. The girl remained in his head, an image engraved like it had been there all his life, waiting to be uncovered, but even when he returned to Japan years later, he had only a face and a given name in his head, and it was not enough to find her again.

The universe might have been cruel for that, if anyone had known enough to judge it.

* * *

Fate was morally blind. It had no reason to tear the two of them apart, even though it happened again and again, as if it was the one consistent line scattered among thousands of different stories.

But it also had no reason not to let them come together.

And even if the chances were stacked a million to one, eventually, that one in a million would occur.

* * *

"Ulquiorra-kun?"

"Hm?"

"Are you asleep again?"

"No …"

She giggled. "I think you are …"

"How would I be speaking to you if I were asleep, woman?" he muttered, half under his breath. She could barely see his eyes from her spot behind him, but she could make out his closed eyelids, his face lax, as her fingers worked their way through the black strands on his head.

"Well, you'll be asleep soon, anyway," she countered with another chuckle. She used her thumbs to rub circles near the part of his hair. "You always are."

"You insist on doing this."

That was his favorite excuse. "There was nothing better to do than sit here" was his second.

She shook her head and bit back a third laugh. "You don't mind."

"Mm …"

His hum trailed into silence once again, and she moved her fingers from the top of his head to his temples for a while to keep her wrists from getting stiff.

The warm breeze trailed around them, slowing but never really stopping, as if picking up streams of sunlight and casting it upon them even where they sat in the shady grass beneath a large tree. She had grown used to the scratch of that particular bark against her back, and even that particular grass through her hakama. And over the years that had passed, the sense of her fingers against his scalp, the locks of his dark hair fallen around them, had become such a familiar touch that she could hardly remember a time before it.

She had mentioned the sheer messiness of his hair one of the first days after they met in Seireitei, when she wanted to talk to him but found herself standing in awkward silence with nothing to say. She had noticed it back in Las Noches and suggested now, on a whim, that she brush it out for him, and in that quiet, agreeable state he had been in during those initial days, he agreed. She sat against a wall in the barracks with her legs spread out, and he sat between them, back to her. She bit her lip and brushed through the mess of black hair, now unobstructed by the large helmet-like mask, her fingers following each stroke of the brush to smooth down stray strands. Only when she started to congratulate herself for getting out all the tangles did she notice that his eyes had begun to droop, and his head loll to one side, his shoulders as loose as they had been since his impromptu nap in her cell.

Orihime stared. Then her eyes softened to match her growing smile, and she brought the brush back to his hair. His head hung a bit loose for several minutes before it fell forward entirely, his breathing slowed and his body limp. She sat against the wall and continued her motions for the next hour until Kuchiki-san came to get her, and even then she only woke him when she was sure she had to.

But seeing his confused, tired eyes blink open had been worth it.

It had been decades since then. Decades of her own life, and decades of his Shinigami training, graduation, and rising through the ranks until he earned Third Seat, the only thing which kept him from higher positions being the lack of necessity for replacements. She visited him so often that by the time she died, Soul Society was already more of a home to her than the Material World, and she hardly missed it. She graduated the Shinigami Academy with high marks and found herself a seated officer soon enough, in the Fourth Division, while Ulquiorra-kun worked under Kuchiki Byakuya. The first time she saw them together, she broke out laughing, and had to apologize five times over to avoid explaining that they acted so similar it was almost scary.

Nearly every time she visited him over the years, his hair had been messy, and she insisted on brushing it, and every time, even if they settled close to the Eleventh Division training grounds, full of loud and screaming men in battle, he fell asleep. When she came to Soul Society for good, he had finally taken to brushing it out himself. At first she was disappointed, but that was cut short when Ulquiorra-kun sat down in front of her on the grass one afternoon, their torsos mere centimeters apart, and waited in silence.

She hadn't had a brush with her, but she had beamed and just massaged his scalp instead.

He fell asleep twice as fast, and from then on, she did away with the excuse of the brush altogether.

It was the last thing she had expected from someone like him, and she would never bring it up in conversation for fear that it would make him stop, but she wouldn't have traded it for the world. She wondered sometimes if it relaxed him for the same reason it relaxed humans, or if it was just another way he assured himself she was still there even while he slept, like when he held her hand all the time they walked through Seireitei, but it didn't really matter to her. Somehow it felt like each time she combed through his hair with her fingers or just rubbed his scalp, she got to wash away the decades, perhaps centuries of loneliness, of holding himself strong and firm. Every time, she got to prove to him that he could be vulnerable, even if only around her.

And it had only ever been her. From the time he had fallen asleep on the couch in her cell, it had always been her.

She had seen it in every look he gave her, even ones with frustration, or bafflement, or what almost seemed like indifference. And she saw it again when they were reintroduced here, him exactly like before, the mask and tears marks gone but his skin still pale, his hair still jet black and messy, his eyes still the deepest green. The recognition in those eyes had been palpable, the mixture of emotions like a drowning ocean, and though she was a bit grateful she had regained her bright cinnamon hair and smooth skin after she finally passed on, he had never seemed to pay any notice to physical change. To him, she was herself, no matter what. She suspected that even if she had first found him later in her human life, if she had been eighty years old with white hair and wrinkles weighing down her face, he would have known her just the same.

She had not thought to look for him here. Somehow her mind had not registered the logic when she saw Kurosaki-kun slash him with his Zanpakutou. That, at their most basic, they were Shinigami and Hollow, and Hollows who were purified got to pass on.

And she might have never found him at all, if not for Ukitake-san going on a walk through a deserted part of Rukongai, where he saw a quiet recluse with dark hair and pale skin sitting underneath a tree, and he had thought to ask his name.

Sometimes she wondered what would have happened if he hadn't.

Her hands slid away from Ulquiorra-kun's head, and she felt him shift in front of her with another quiet hum, this one—she thought—of disapproval. She smiled despite herself, but let her hands hover near his scalp, her breath slow as the sun glowed over them, warm and bright, while the leaves of the tree they sat against cast twisted shadows on the grass around their legs.

"Did you think you'd come here?" she murmured, more to herself than to him. "When you died?"

He stayed silent for several seconds. Orihime listened as she always did for other Shinigami nearby, but she heard no one. No one had found this place yet. A part of her hoped they never would.

Ulquiorra-kun shifted again. "I'm certain you've asked me this before."

"Hm," she hummed in half agreement. "It's been a long time. I don't remember. Did you?"

"I never thought of such a thing."

She tilted her head, though she knew he couldn't see. "Where did you think you'd go?"

"I told you," he answered, the slight irritation in his voice familiar to her now, and somehow comfortable, ever since she realized he no longer meant it. "I never thought of that."

"What did you think about?" she asked, her own voice quieter than she intended. It felt like she had become the breeze rushing around them, drawing them together, a fresh breath of cool air on a gentle warm day.

He leaned his head back a bit, and though he didn't look at her, she could imagine those soft eyes, half-closed, eyebrows curved and gentle, so that she could barely recognize the one who had met her in the Dangai to threaten her friends and order her to follow him away.

"Whether you would reach back."

Her chest twisted, like the rush of old memories never quite forgotten had turned into a needle and jabbed her, before it filled and warmed. She could not have stopped the tugging on the corners of her lips if she tried, and for all the world, she did not want to. She wondered if he could somehow sense her smile even as he stared in front of her, and though he did not move at all, she knew, in the way she always knew, that he did.

It was nearly half a minute later that he rolled his shoulders back and forward again in the comfortable silence.

"Are you going to continue your favorite pastime or shall we begin training?"

She lifted her brow, blinked, then giggled one more time. She slid her fingers into his hair once again and rubbed along the side of his scalp, making her way closer to the top of his head in a long-familiar pattern. "Oh, five more minutes or so."

Even with his head turned away from her, toward the grass which glistened under the sun and the trees surrounding the small clearing they had found, she could almost feel his eyes droop. His head tilted back again as if his neck had lost the energy to keep it up, then leaned forward, though whether it was out of tiredness or to give her better access to the back of his scalp, she was never sure. Nonetheless, she moved her hands down toward his neck, and he breathed a long, slow exhale through his nose.

"Hm …"

Her smile stretched so far her cheeks ached.

"Make that thirty."

He did not respond.

By the time she finally stopped, her hands had cramped, his neck was stiff, and they had each missed several afternoon meetings, but as always, neither of them cared.

* * *

With Hollows and wars and missions, regardless of their circumstances, there were bound to be plenty of worlds when one or both of them was cut out of the reincarnation cycle altogether. Where they floated around as reishi until they were eventually gathered into brand new beings, pushed back into the cycle by a birth in Seireitei or Rukongai. After that, it was rare they would meet again.

But in a scarce few, they remained. They found one another and traveled together through the cycle, separated at times but always finding each other again. It didn't matter what form they took, if one was born before the other, if they found each other as a woman saving an orphaned little boy or a small girl placing a flower into the hand of a dying man, as astronaut partners on a space mission, as best friends running to the playground, as members of two opposing armies that could not stand to fight one another though they never knew why.

In one world, if only by the balance of chance, the universe granted a wish. And, this one time, it allowed them to keep it.

* * *

There were infinite lifetimes, infinite versions of each. In a history of billions of people, they were only two, and the lifetimes in which either of them had even been born made up only a handful, and even in the ones they did, it was hard to find lifetimes where things had not been shifted. Sometimes they held new names or new faces, small variations in their birth or their appearance. Something they were raised better, or worse, and sometimes they were so unrecognizable they would not have known each other even if their paths had crossed.

There were infinite ways things could have changed, but also infinite ways in which things could have stayed the same.

* * *

In one lifetime, all that changed was the shoes she bought to go with her uniform before the first day of high school.

That was all.

It was that new pair of shoes that she wore on the day Kuchiki-san first appeared at school, a cheery new student Kurosaki-kun paid more attention to than he ever had her. The shoes she wore to the Handicrafts Club where she watched Ishida-kun from a distance, the expert sewer who shunned conversations with classmates. The shoes she wore when she first discovered her Shun Shun Rikka and trained to control them. The shoes she left behind in her apartment to go to Soul Society, the shoes that sat in stillness as she saw what Kurosaki-kun fought for and how hard he would fight to do it, as she saw the depth of Sado-kun's determination to help—his desperation as strong as her own—as she saw Ishida-kun as chivalrous, quirky and awkward in contrast to the wall he put up before. The shoes she put on again when they returned, safe and sound, and she made up lies to force past her lips to keep Tatsuki-chan from discovering what had happened. The shoes that carried her across town to the park, the shoes she wore when she first saw the two invaders and tried and failed to protect Tatsuki-chan. The shoes she wore when the Arrancar with the pale skin and casual stance was a nameless enemy, and she had no idea of any connection they might later hold. The shoes that she slipped on every day while she healed, when Urahara-san told her she wouldn't be fit for battle, and when Kuchiki-san, the same tough but caring Kuchiki-san, took her away for a month to train, in the genuine hope that she would be able to fight. To help, in one way or another.

And it was those shoes she wore in the Dangai on the way back from Soul Society, heading toward the battle, those shoes that froze when the Garganta tore open behind her. Those shoes which carried her to Kurosaki-kun's room to attempt the kiss she never completed, and those shoes that carried her to the meeting place, through the Garganta, through Las Noches, staring at the pale figure in front of her with hands in his pockets and dark lips she tried to imagine in a smile. Those shoes she set aside as she pulled on her new white uniform, and which she never saw again.

She wondered later, on occasion, if they had been burned with her old clothes. She wondered if the ashes had been tossed out a window into the sand below. And she wondered if those ashes might have met his, and swirled together in the wind until they scattered, leaving only a few minuscule fragments together, circling one another in a silent dance under the moon.

Even if it was only a few fragments, even if all the others spread far away and only two stayed close, she decided that would be fine.

Just one instance of two fragments from two distant worlds, finally brought together.

That was enough.

* * *

"What would you do if you had five lifetimes, Ulquiorra-kun?"

"I have no need for five lifetimes. You are already here."


End file.
